RE: [EXTERNAL] Re: RTEMS5 EPICS board support

["Baily, Scott A via Tech-talk" <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

We've been using the CR-12 board for compact PCI with VxWorks 6.8.   This is a 3^rd generation Intel i7 processor.  It's been obsolete for 5 years now, and a we're low on spares.  There are newer i7 boards available, but I don't know if any have RTEMS support.  It seems like if we're going to something new VxWorks 6.x (EPICS doesn't work with 7) isn't the best option.  We have almost 100 of the CR-12s deployed in cPCI crates.  I'm not sure how difficult it is to get a board support package working of one of these.

We do have RTEMS 4.11 running on Altera NIOS-II soft-core processors in VPX crates (with a bridge card to talk to some cPCI devices).  Although, having to use NFSv2 is not ideal.

Certainly, newer versions are fine, but we're looking for something we can get working right away.

 

From: Joel Sherrill <joel.sherrill at gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2023 4:06 PM
To: Baily, Scott A <sbaily at lanl.gov>
Cc: tech-talk at aps.anl.gov
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: RTEMS5 EPICS board support

 

 

 

On Tue, Oct 17, 2023 at 4:35 PM Baily, Scott A via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov> wrote:

What currently available (non-obsolete) hardware has RTEMS5 support?  I particularly interested in boards that could go in cPCI crates.  I'd like to begin the process of moving away from VxWorks.  If I'm going to purchase boards for new installations or to replace old systems that fail, what boards should I be considering?

 

Vijay Banerjee and I visited SLAC and LBNL last week and the now unavailable MVME VME and CPCI hardware is a challenge for the EPICS communicate. I came away thinking I needed to do some research to see what was used in other domains.

 

NAVAIR has the HOST standard (https://host-oa.com/) which I have read far enough to see they stayed in the VITA family and went with OpenVPX and PC/104 buses. I don't think RTEMS currently has any BSPs for OpenVPX boards unless it is based on an SoC and added bus.PC/104 is just a PC so that's ok.

I took the approach of looking for CPCI boards with Zynq SoCs on them. That turned up some with MPSoC (aarch64) which unfortunately has RTEMS support in 6 but not 5. There are also some based on NXP QorIQ PowerPC CPUs. I don't know the long term situation on the QorIQ but I see them going into long life products FWIW. RTEMS 5 supports the QorIQ. But no CPCI board AFAIK. Both of those are SoCs so should be a variation of an existing reference board design with bus support added. 

My quick search did not turn up any CPCI Zynq based boards which would be ARM 32-bit. But they are almost certainly out there. It would again be a SoC with a bus added.

There should also be some CPCI PC compatibles. PC/104 is PC compatible.

 

Disclaimer the HOST standard info is just from the FAQ. I haven't read the standard yet or contacted the the folks I think I know that work on it.

 

Many of our systems are capable of running linux as well as VxWorks, but must respond (via software) to timing events within 200 microseconds.

 

I don't think that's a problem with the MPSoC or QorIQ. Both are quite fast and RTEMS latencies just get smaller.

If you loosen your requirement to EPICS 7 and RTEMS 6, the aarch64 MPSoC CPCI boards should be good long term solution.

 

This problem is something that is hard to solve because it involves guessing which CPUs have the longest life yet. Without having done any serious research, I'm guessing the Xilinx parts on CPCI are likely to have the most life left.

 

--joel sherrill

RTEMS

 

 

Thank You,

                Scott